Tag Archives: neurodiversity

Peep Game Comix: “Attention All African American comic book creators and publishers, we are looking for original titles to add to Peep Game Comix. We are looking for current projects and even back catalogs of books.”

Hurricanes with women’s names more deadly: study | Joan Cary at Chicago Tribune (June 2): “According to a recent study by University of Illinois researchers, hurricanes with women’s names are likely to cause significantly more deaths than those with masculine names — not because the feminine-named storms are stronger, but because they are perceived as less threatening and so people are less prepared.”

Why Have Female Hurricanes Killed More People Than Male Ones? | Ed Yong at National Geographic (June 2): “Jung team thinks that the effect he found is due to unfortunate stereotypes that link men with strength and aggression, and women with warmth and passivity… But Jeff Lazo from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research disagrees. He’s a social scientist and economist who has looked into the public communication of hurricane risk, and he thinks the pattern is most likely a statistical fluke, which arose because of the ways in which the team analysed their data.” (Study authors respond at comment #7.)

Do Female-Named Hurricanes Need To Lean In? | Beth Novey at NPR (June 3): “We’re also worried about what this trend means for the career advancement of female storms. We’ve seen this before. We know where this is going. So to get ahead of the curve, we’d like to offer some advice to all the girls out there hoping to become fearsome natural disasters when they grow up.”

We Can Be Atheists Without Being Jerks | s.e. smith at this ain’t livin’ (June 3): “I wasn’t aware that atheism came with a requirement to be an asshole to people of faith, to mock, belittle, and hurt them for believing in something different than you do — and the hostility towards religion from prominent atheists these days makes me, at times, embarrassed to call myself one.”

Goodbye to All That: Today Is Katie Cotton’s Last Day at Apple | Kara Swisher at Re/code (May 30): “Consider the various words used to describe her: ‘Queen of Evil,’ ‘wicked witch,’ ‘cold and distant,’ ‘frigid supremacy,’ ‘queen bee’ and, perhaps most obviously misogynistic, “dominatrix.”… it’s both sad and disturbing that it’s still okay to talk about a high-ranking woman in this way and make it seem as if it was a cogent and valid commentary on her performance as a professional executive.”

Codes of conduct aren’t enough | Coral Sheldon-Hess at Web Kunoichi (May 29): “I’m not arguing against codes of conduct, here. I’m just saying, a code of conduct isn’t enough; it’s a good first step, but you can’t adopt one (even a good one) and then pat yourself on the back that your community is safe and welcoming and beautiful. If we want our communities and events to be safe and welcoming, we need to build a culture of mutual support, of standing up for one another and not letting anyone be mistreated or made to feel uncomfortable for being who they are.”

The Gentrifier’s Guide to Getting Along | Chinaka Hodge at San Francisco Magazine (May 30): “The core of what this means is that your new neighbors, we folks who have been here, who remember Oakland before we were Michelin starred, Decemberists headlined, or Times approved, are traumatized. We are hurt, confused, angry, and disillusioned. We lost people, we lost homes, we lost agency, we lost our favorite eateries—we even lost the ability to name our hoods.”

How to Get Girls Into Coding | Nitasha Tiku at the New York Times (May 31): “So what if, instead of trying to guess at what might get girls interested in technology, we looked at what’s already on their screens? While parents often worry about recreational ‘screen time,’ some educators now believe that gaming could be a way to get girls interested in coding, and even to increase the numbers of girls in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — classes and schools.”

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Marissa Lingen writes on the highly disturbing but very very common theme of explaining harassment and abuse as inevitable results of people with autism spectrum conditions participating in geek or online communities:

Somebody conflated predatory sexual harassment with lack of social skills, and both of them with “Asberger’s,” by which one can only assume they mean Asperger’s syndrome/autism spectrum disorders.

…

People who have poor social skills, whether because of a neurological condition or because they were raised badly or because they have disdained to learn them or whatever other reason–those people make their social gaffes in full view of large groups. Their colleagues are never surprised to find that they have been saying inappropriate things to a particular group of people for years, because they have poor enough social skills that they don’t get that they’re screwing up. So they don’t hide it. These are the folks who will be sitting with you in the consuite and blurt out a remark, about two notches too loud, about the size of your breasts. And if you are a kind person and feel that they might learn, you can gently say something about that not being a very appropriate thing to say.

But someone who waits until they are with someone they perceive to be in a position of less power to make their remarks? Someone who makes sure that there are no witnesses who will have the authority to censure them? Someone who makes a consistent pattern of aiming their behavior at people who will have a difficult time making the bad behavior known or a reason not to do so? That is not someone who lacks social skills. That’s someone who is using their social skills fairly precisely.

(Warning: intersectionality problems.) Feminism is no longer about sexism at all: It’s fascinating the extent to which women have been shamed out of even claiming a movement to address sexism. We just aren’t allowed to have that. Too strident. Too pushy.

Spelman Students Beat Out Harvard and MIT for Best Mobile App: Jonecia and Jazmine are living proof that innovation is not the exclusive domain of the white male geek. There are plenty of us black geeks out there too who need a little more support. Congrats to J and J — you deserve the recognition and that new iPad or iPhone. Meet Jonecia and Jazmine at their website Maromi Sai.

Finsia Busts Common Myths About Women and Work (PDF media release, paper here): The Financial Services Institute of Australasia (Finsia)… today launched a policy exposition paper which debunks the most common myths with regard to the lack of women holding leadership roles in financial services…The paper has some interesting survey results, like the 'perception gap' between men and women when asked if they have observed different treatment of women compared to men in promotional opportunities, in meetings and training/development.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention (twitter uses can use #geekfeminism). Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Trying to do it mostly right most of the time: The Border House‘s rho interviews Failbetter Games’s Alexis Kennedy, primary writer for Echo Bazaar, about the game’s approach to diversity, sexism and racism in a setting that was historically sexist and racist.

Feminomics: calculating the value of ‘women’s work’: an interview with Marilyn Waring, author of If Women Counted. But how will we know [about women’s unpaid work] in the future? This past summer, the Conservatives, in rewriting the long-form census, eliminated only the section on unpaid work. That means that, in the future, StatsCan won’t be able to tell us with any certainty that men perform an average of 2.5 hours of unpaid work per day while women do 4.3 hours, like they did in 2005.

I’m Right Here: Rudy Simone on Life as an “Aspergirl”: Aspergirls is partly a personal memoir and partly a book of advice and support for women on the spectrum and their parents and friends. Simone has asked a chorus of Aspie women to speak through its pages, and this personal testimony is deeply moving.

“Renewable Girls” Peddlar Responds: Earlier this week, I critiqued the sale of a cheesecake calendar to help promote and sell solar panels, and asked readers to write to its purveyor, a dude called John B.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Check out, and contribute to, Flickr’s Women in Tech group, photos of women in technology speaking at conferences or doing techy things. (Also check out The New Feminine for a little subversion of what “feminine” seems to mean on Flickr.)

Boys ‘prefer cars from early on’: In non-news, researchers and reporters continue to talk past each other. Children, even very young children, prefer toys of the types that they have already been exposed to. Gender essentialism continues triumphant and wrong.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if youâ€™re a delicious user, tag them â€œgeekfeminismâ€ to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

As I mentioned in the link roundup, the LWN thread on the Free Software Foundation’s women in Free Software mini-summit will burn your sanity points. But there’s an interesting comment thread involving Matthew Garrett (mjg59) and Bruce Perens about Asperger’s and high functioning autism and what can be expected from people with Asperger’s if they are critised for sexist behaviour or otherwise offending people.

I wanted to highlight this discussion largely because “(s)he can’t help it, (s)he’s autistic” and the more disturbing variant “if geekdom just tossed out all those non-neurotypical folk, all the nasty sexism would go away” pop up fairly commonly in geek feminism discussions. (I don’t observe this much from geek feminists themselves, although being neurotypical I won’t be as alert to it, but certainly in the discussions.) I appreciate the considerably more nuanced discussion on this.

Note for commenters: While the LWN discussion started by talking about Richard Stallman (RMS) and the EMACs virgins incidents, statements about Stallman being neurotypical or not seem to be a matter of speculation only. Comments on this post making blanket assumptions about all neurodiverse people being unable to function in society or perform certain social tasks, or presuming that any individual is or is not neurotypical without that person’s self-identification being known, will be deleted.

I have , otoh, experienced that sense of mistrust – not about males -but more often about women, and mostly, female neurotypicals […] What if you had to move as an adult to an alien culture that just happens to speak your same language, but with different meanings for many of the words, with different ways of “being polite”. What if, because you happened to speak the “same” language, you are assumed to just know the cultural norms – for example, the holidays, the rules of the road, the little rules of interaction, that are just different enough from your own culture so that you get tripped up regularly. And what if, instead of explaining patiently to you what you did and how to avoid it in the future, everyone assumed you were tripping up on purpose because “everyone knows that” and anyone who does it “wrong” is deliberately being a troll. How comfortable would you feel in that society?

Welcome to what it feels like to live in neurotypical society.

So yeah – I tend to be, I think, more tolerant of those who have sincere questions about things like “disability 101” and “feminism 101” because frankly, most folks don’t grok “neurodiversity 101”. While I understand being tired of explaining what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s society, I perhaps have less sympathy than I might if I were neurotypical – because I am different in an invisible way. Because the neurotypical has no idea how many assumptions they are making about everyone – and when they refuse to explain in response to an honest query – they’re doing *no one* any good.

Before I begin I should note that I am neurotypical. Some of Anna’s writing above will probably ring some bells to geek women in general: a lot of geek women can recount feeling more comfortable in male dominated environments or rather geek dominated (and hence almost always male dominated) environments, because many geek women have various clashes with non-geek and female socialisation and some trouble with “the rules”. We may talk about that in some future post.

But this specific issue is about what neurotypicals assume about diversity discussions and fundamental commonalities between people in such discussions. Anyone got thoughts? Add them here or at Anna’s blog as suits, and remember that if you are, like me, neurotypical and broadly uninformed about neurodiversity, then it behooves you to do a great deal of listening.